As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(36)
She said it in the same, slow, cold, slippery, sinister tones that the snake must have used when speaking to Eve in the Garden of Eden.
With lightning reflexes, I slid the medallion into the pocket of my dressing gown and wrapped it in the depths of my handkerchief.
“What have you got there?”
“Nothing, Miss Fawlthorne.”
“Nonsense! What is it? Hand it over.”
It was an all or nothing moment: the moment of truth, as bullfighters call it.
Or, in my case, the moment of untruth.
“Please, miss, phlegm,” I said, pulling the handkerchief from my pocket and holding it out for her inspection. I arranged my features into a look of embarrassment. “I think I’ve caught rather a bad chill.”
As added insurance I brought up from the very depths of my gizzard a convincing cough, and spat an imaginary substance into the crumpled handkerchief.
Again I offered it.
It requires a certain nerve to play at this kind of game: a kind of steely bluff combined with the innocence of a baby lily, and I must say that I was rather good at it.
“Put that filthy thing away,” Miss Fawlthorne said with a look of disgust, before abruptly changing the subject. “Why are these lights turned on?”
I almost said, “I thought I was coughing up blood, and wanted to have a look,” but something told me to quit while I was ahead.
“I got up early to write my report on William Palmer,” I said, giving my mouth a final wipe and gesturing to my notebook and pen, which were—praise be!—lying on my desktop.
What a perfect title that would make for one of the volumes of my autobiography when it comes time to write it: Lying on My Desktop. I must remember to make a note of it.
Miss Fawlthorne said nothing, but stared at me steadily, the ruby pin at her throat rising and falling in slow, regular hypnotic waves. One breath after another.
“I cannot allow this to pass, Flavia,” she said at last, as if she had come to a sudden decision. “Do you understand?”
I nodded—suddenly Miss Humility herself.
“We shall have a talk,” she said. “But not here, and not now. Immediately after your gymnasium class this morning, I want you to go out for a long walk—alone—and reflect upon your disobedience. When you have done so to my satisfaction—well, we shall see.”
The gymnasium was an echoing canyon with a floor on several levels. It had once been a chapel, with towering stone arches, sunken aisles, gilded organ pipes, and quaint grottoes, but now the saints and martyrs in the stained-glass windows had nothing better to look down upon than a clutter of vaulting horses, parallel bars, climbing ropes, and rings suspended on chains: remarkably like the torture chamber in a castle I had once toured in Girl Guides.
I felt even more cold and naked and doltish in the square-necked navy gym slip than I had the first time, as if I were the village idiot in a smock—or a cowering pawn on someone else’s chessboard.
A shrill whistle blew as I entered and instructions were shouted. “Left arm upward … right arm forward … stretch! Right arm forward … left arm upward … stretch. Head forward … bend … stretch! Head left sideways … bend … stretch!”
I must be honest about the fact that I’m made extremely uneasy by excessive noise, and that I do not care for shouted instructions. If I’d been meant to be a sheep, I reasoned, I’d have been born with wool instead of skin.
I swarmed up a wooden ladder; dropped heavily to the mat; gave out a little cry of agony; winced in the direction of Miss Puddicombe, the games mistress; hooked my leg at an awkward angle as if to check for a broken bone; massaged my calf; and limped off to my room to get rid of the clown outfit.
We’d deal with the paperwork later.
I was blessed to have been born with an excellent sense of direction so that, even in the bath or the WC, I always have a fairly good idea of which way’s north.
Standing in the street outside Miss Bodycote’s, I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction. North lay the North Pole, which seemed so much closer here in Canada than it had at Buckshaw. Too far north, I knew, and you run out of trees and into polar bears, but there seemed little chance of that with trams—sorry, streetcars—clanging away at the end of the block.
But I soon reconsidered. I was supposed to be thinking about my disobedience, but instead I found myself realizing that in street upon changing street of nearly identical houses, I might well become lost. I was, after all, in a strange city—face it, Flavia: in a strange country. Who knew what unsuspected dangers lurked just round the next corner?
A woman in a pink knitted hat came running out of a house whose windows upstairs were covered with bedsheets and an unfamiliar flag.
“Are you lost?” she called out, after no more than a glance at me.
Could it be so obvious that I was a stranger?
I smiled at her (no point in aggravating the natives), turned on my heel, and went back the way I had come.
It didn’t take much thinking to realize that there was much greater safety in sticking to the busier streets.
Follow the tram lines, my instinct was whispering into my ear.
A few minutes later I found myself once more in front of Miss Bodycote’s, from which a buzz of busy voices floated to my ears. It was good to be outdoors. It was good to be alone.